Politics in Photography

This tribute certainly gets the long distance award. A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable guard on a tool on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and bears an image of the American flag.

The memorial is on the rover’s rock abrasion tool, which was being made in September 2001 by workers at Honeybee Robotics in lower Manhattan, less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

Opportunity’s panoramic camera and navigation camera photographed the tool on Sept. 11, 2011, during the 2,713th Martian day of the rover’s work on Mars. Opportunity completed its three-month prime mission on Mars in April 2004 and has worked for more than seven years since then in bonus extended missions.

Homes washed away, lives wrecked, farmland torn asunder, yet beauty remains. Hurricane Irene’s damage to Vermont is yet unmeasured to the accountants, insurance companies and cash-strapped FEMA. Six years after Katrina, we are reminded again that it’s the people who feel the measure of the hurricane’s power.

I never expected to see the royals look quite this comfy, did you? The newlyweds William and Kate were quite the hit from Calgary to California on their recent tour. Here, on July 7 the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are all smiles with cowboy hats at the Calgary Stampede at the BMO Centre in Calgary, Alberta . They’ve probably done more for international relations that all the elected leaders of late!

While the news changes by the hour with the nuclear complications due to the 8.9 earthquake, aftershocks and massive tsunami in Japan, here’s one of the most graphic quotes from the New York Times:

“Though Japanese officials have refused to speculate on how high the death toll could rise, an expert who dealt with the 2004 Asian tsunami offered a dire outlook.

‘It’s a miracle really, if it turns out to be less than 10,000 dead,’ said Hery Harjono, a senior geologist with the Indonesian Science Institute, who was closely involved with the aftermath of the earlier disaster that killed 230,000 people — of which only 184,000 bodies were found.”